The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday said it might open a probe into the Criminal Investigation Bureau for possibly leaking key information, after a magazine published two photographs purportedly taken during the murder of five siblings in Hualien County nine years ago — images that the office said it had not seen.
The photographs published yesterday by the Chinese-language Next Magazine showed a gloved man — purportedly the murder suspect and the father of the five slain children, Liu Chih-chun (劉志勤) — tying up a girl, said to be his eldest daughter, Liu Chi-chen (劉其臻), on a bed.
The magazine alleged that Liu Chih-chun’s wife, Lin Chen-mi (林真米), the other suspect, took the pictures.
Photo: CNA
Head prosecutor Hsu Chien-jung (許建榮) said the office had not been given the photographs and immediately told the bureau to turn them over.
The bodies of the five children were discovered when police entered the couple’s house on Sept. 8, 2006, after neighbors complained of a foul odor coming from the residence.
The children were found strangled to death in the bathroom, with their hands and feet bound by wires.
A digital camera without a memory card was found at the murder scene and taken by the bureau as evidence, but technology to recover data in the camera’s internal memory emerged only recently, Hsu said.
The bureau restored about a dozen photographs, which were mostly regular family pictures unrelated to the slayings, except the two photographs published by Next Magazine, which are apparently crucial to the investigation and which the bureau should have submitted to the office, Hsu said.
The office ordered the bureau to turn over all the photographs it had restored, adding that it would investigate whether the bureau had violated the principle of secrecy during an investigation and whether it had withheld or improperly disclosed key information, Hsu said.
Rumors suggested that the crime scene photographs were extracted after investigators last week identified remains found on Tzuyun Mountain (慈雲山) as belonging to the couple.
However, the office combed through the files and evidence related to the case without finding the photographs published by the magazine, Hsu said.
According to Hsu, investigators said the couple probably committed suicide by ingesting pesticide on the remote mountainside, because they had no way to avoid capture and were driven to despair.
However, the couple’s cause of death and the motive behind the murders remains undetermined, he added.
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